By JESSICA BLANCHARD, P-I REPORTER

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, January 17, 2008

When Beacon Hill Elementary transitions to an international school this fall, its foreign-language immersion programs undoubtedly will be so popular that students likely will have to live in the neighborhood to get a seat.

On Thursday, the kindergarten tour was packed with parents eager to learn more about plans to offer full and partial language-immersion programs in Spanish and Mandarin. The South End school will be the district's second elementary to offer dual-language immersion and a global, multicultural curriculum.

It will be modeled after the John Stanford International School in Wallingford, an award-winning school so sought-after that students usually have to live within a mile of the building to get in. The program routinely has a waiting list of about 100 families.

Most of Beacon Hill's 379 students already speak a second language at home, and the school offers federally funded half-hour Mandarin classes and a Spanish literacy program.

Students in Beacon Hill's language-immersion programs will spend half their days studying core subjects such as math or reading in the foreign language; the rest of the day's lessons will be taught in English. There will also be an English-immersion program for non-English-speaking students.

In each program, "the core is cultural competency," Murphy said. "We live in a global society. We want our children to know ... how to connect with people all over the world."

The immediate interest among potential Beacon Hill parents underscores the growing demand for language instruction in Seattle and around the country.

Students need to learn the skills to be successful when they eventually enter the global work force, said Karen Kodama, the district's international education coordinator.

When she polled business leaders to ask what skills they wanted future employees to have, they often cited language skills -- particularly fluency in Spanish, Japanese and Mandarin, the official dialect of China.

With that in mind, Seattle Public Schools leaders intend to create nine more international schools around the city in the next few years, eventually providing an international "pathway" for students from kindergarten to 12th grade, Kodama said.

It's encouraging to see Seattle expanding these programs, said Vivien Stewart, vice president of education for the New York-based Asia Society, which works to strengthen relations between Asia and the U.S.

In the 21st century, it's more important than ever for students to learn to be good global citizens, she said.

"There's beginning to be this sense of global interconnectedness -- the sense that all the problems we face, as Americans or humans, cross borders. Students are going to need a different set of knowledge and skills than before."